logoalt Hacker News

0xbadcafebeetoday at 3:50 AM1 replyview on HN

What does that say about pure journalism? Publish information despite doing harm? How do you present the information, and what impact does that presentation have?

Historically, newspapers often published the full name and physical address of every person they covered, from judges to drunks to rape victims to people suspected of a crime. I'm sure people back in the day called that pure journalism, but I don't think we'd call it "good" today. Our standards today might also not be as good as we assume.


Replies

ghafftoday at 5:44 AM

Historically, people got a big book every year with the name and address of most people in it. You could get unlisted numbers but now everyone has a cellphone which just isn’t broadly published but because now many use it for everything it’s probably not that hard to find.

Also, has others have noted it’s trivial to put other a list of wealthy people. In fact, it’s probably better to skip the Forbes 400 list who probably have some level of private security. Just go through the board member lists of Fortune 500 companies.